Hoverboard

November 27, 2015 8:33 AM

The XKCD comic for 11/24/15 is this game. The goal seems to be collecting as many gold coins as you can and put them in a coin.. depositor. (protip: you can keep pressing up to keep jumping up through the air. Hoverboard technology is sweet)

But those aren't all the coins. The Imperial Star Destroyer has a lot, and I think there's a few in the volcano. And although it's shiny, the top of the Washington Monument is not a coin.

posted by numaner (46 comments total)

If you'd rather just browse around the map, you can use this one (everything tinted red can be passed through), or this one (which seems to be very slow). This image is the whole game space, which will ruin a lot of the surprise.
posted by numaner at 8:37 AM on November 27, 2015 [4 favorites]

The top of the Washington Monument is indeed shiny.
posted by schmod at 8:44 AM on November 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

Is this Frog Fractions 2?
posted by brecc at 8:51 AM on November 27, 2015 [5 favorites]

Can this be played on a phone? All I can seem to do is jump.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:38 AM on November 27, 2015

Is this paid advertising for a certain movie?
posted by dilaudid at 9:49 AM on November 27, 2015

I found Slim Pickens while following a cascade of torpedoes, and now I'm pootling around inside what might be a Star Destroyer.
posted by figurant at 9:59 AM on November 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Can this be played on a phone? All I can seem to do is jump.

It's finicky on my craptacular Samsung, but tilting left-right to steer probably works if your phone is a newish Android or iPhone.
posted by brennen at 10:10 AM on November 27, 2015

grumpybear69, I had to move my whole laptop (I do not have what they call this smartphone). I was really surprised that tilting the laptop worked (clunkily).
posted by transient at 10:16 AM on November 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Could not get past the corridor peristalsis.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 10:17 AM on November 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

This was amusing until I found the Star Destroyer at which point the collision detection made me ragequit.
posted by shakespeherian at 10:17 AM on November 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Whoa. I had no idea that my rather old Macbook has a tilt sensor in it. Weird.
posted by schmod at 10:29 AM on November 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

I found this wiki page which gives a lot of details (and spoilers) for this game as well as a ton of ways to hack/cheat, including ways to disable the tilt-to-steer on Macs and ways to turn on noclip.
posted by sleeping bear at 10:35 AM on November 27, 2015

shakespeherian try it on a proper pc, the arrow keys make it much easier to maneuver.

the fine folks at explainxkcd have some cheats found so far listed, what I find most convenient but not overly cheating is goggles mode, where you can see what has no collision when you're right next to it.

err or what sleeping bear said.
posted by numaner at 10:37 AM on November 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Argh, twice now a land/spaceship mass has loaded over my character, trapping him forever. I'm on an rather weak connection though.
posted by postcommunism at 10:42 AM on November 27, 2015

transient: "grumpybear69, I had to move my whole laptop (I do not have what they call this smartphone). I was really surprised that tilting the laptop worked (clunkily)."

I thought this was a dumb joke aimed at the gullible until I moved my macbook pro and the character moved. Which is good, because it's almost unplayable with the arrow keys.
posted by double block and bleed at 11:09 AM on November 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

When I played this on the Wednesday, I found 132 coins in total before I got fed up. That doesn't seem too bad, based on the wiki information. Thanks for posting.
posted by YAMWAK at 11:18 AM on November 27, 2015

Yeah, I had no idea my old MBP had a tile sensor.
posted by slogger at 11:19 AM on November 27, 2015

As you might expect the vi/vim/nethack cardinal direction keys work as well...
posted by jim in austin at 11:35 AM on November 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

It would be awesome if anything at all worked for me.
posted by Samizdata at 11:54 AM on November 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

shakespeherian try it on a proper pc, the arrow keys make it much easier to maneuver.

I'm on a PC! Running into characters' speech and finding finicky narrow passages that have to be gotten through at just the right angle got to be too much for me.
posted by shakespeherian at 11:56 AM on November 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

I played almost the entire map, and then I got hit by an obscure bug. I went into a location moments before the image of that area rendered, and when it did, I found myself stuck inside a piece of the star destroyer. Since I was literally inside the black, I couldn't move at all, and had to quit.

Edit: now that I've seen other comments, I'm glad I'm not alone in this bug.
posted by mystyk at 12:07 PM on November 27, 2015

I didn't have any problem with navigating around. The little guy did stick to the walls sometimes, but it wasn't much of an issue.

Look at the maps if you can't fly about.
posted by asok at 12:11 PM on November 27, 2015

Wow how cool!

The star destroyer is definitely the most fun part of this, that thing is MASSIVE. I wonder how many people worked on this.
posted by subdee at 12:26 PM on November 27, 2015

Warning: broken on Safari, you're supposed to be able to pass through people and their dialogue, and some bits of the landscape.
posted by egypturnash at 12:45 PM on November 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Older MacBooks have an accelerometer (aka tilt sensor)in them so they know when they are in free fall and can park the hard disk heads before the computer hits the floor. I don't know if newer flash storage only MacBooks have that or not.
posted by rockindata at 12:56 PM on November 27, 2015 [8 favorites]

The star destroyer is definitely the most fun part of this, that thing is MASSIVE. I wonder how many people worked on this.

If it's like other xkcd specials, the art is all just Munroe. However, apparently Max Goodman helped with the game code aspects.
posted by tavella at 12:57 PM on November 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Word is there are a couple of Steven Universe easter eggs hidden around the map.
posted by JHarris at 1:10 PM on November 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

I feel like I have failed as a gamer and a human for having played this yesterday, gotten "all" the coins in 21 seconds and said to myself "I guess that's all to see here."
posted by 256 at 1:23 PM on November 27, 2015 [14 favorites]

Older MacBooks have an accelerometer (aka tilt sensor)in them so they know when they are in free fall and can park the hard disk heads before the computer hits the floor.

I have talked and will talk a mountain of shit about Apple but I have to admit that that is pretty fucking great.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:25 PM on November 27, 2015 [5 favorites]

I feel like I have failed as a gamer and a human for having played this yesterday, gotten "all" the coins in 21 seconds and said to myself "I guess that's all to see here."

I was close to that before I realized that big open stuff like this masquerading as small things is a huge Randall Monroe thing.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:26 PM on November 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

ugh! volcano! i guess that is how one dies. get stuck = reset
posted by eustatic at 1:28 PM on November 27, 2015

Whoa. I had no idea that my rather old Macbook has a tilt sensor in it. Weird.

Shit I gave up after making it into the volcano because my controls were glitching out. But maybe I was just tilting the MacBook?
posted by atoxyl at 1:42 PM on November 27, 2015

Is the initial play area meant to represent anything other than "generic platformer level," like a circuit diagram or some such?
posted by HeroZero at 1:49 PM on November 27, 2015

so far I can tell you guys that there are no bugs on Windows 7 with the latest Firefox using arrow keys :)
posted by numaner at 2:17 PM on November 27, 2015

The first time I tried it didn't have the "You got 15 coins in 30 seconds" or "You successfully avoided all the coins" or "RETURN TO PLAY AREA!" messages. Those are really quite helpful for knowing what is going on.

But still, this is amazing. I got stuck in one of the Star Destroyer's mazes and had to restart.
posted by mountmccabe at 2:19 PM on November 27, 2015

I have to decide whether to deinstall my Pinterest button for this, it's in the way of the first gold coin...sigh.
posted by yueliang at 2:22 PM on November 27, 2015

> ugh! volcano! i guess that is how one dies. get stuck = reset

If you are where I think you are, you're not actually stuck.
posted by postcommunism at 2:28 PM on November 27, 2015

I refuse to believe Greg Nog does not have a hoard of gold coins.
posted by shakespeherian at 4:30 PM on November 27, 2015 [5 favorites]

Tilt sensors on Apple laptops were A Thing after the release of the Macbook nearly 10 years ago. mathowie got some clicks showing it off using a game I wrote. This is the closest I've ever interacted with the gentleman 25869 steps my senior.
posted by rlk at 4:48 PM on November 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm glad we got the maps and what have you. I did a fair bit of exploring, but the control scheme on my iPad was so foul (and my cat so eager for attention) that I gave up on my way to the star destroyer.
posted by wotsac at 5:36 PM on November 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

So maybe the point isn't to get as many coins as you can, as quickly as you can. Hmmm.
posted by Ansible at 5:46 PM on November 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Warning: broken on Safari, you're supposed to be able to pass through people and their dialogue, and some bits of the landscape.

No wonder it seemed oddly unplayable. Turning on Goggles Mode, it looks like some scattered pixels within the people and dialog that are supposed to be passable are still not passable, so sometimes it works, but only at unpredictable angles and directions.
posted by JiBB at 9:00 PM on November 27, 2015

I only explored the left side and had no idea about the right side at all. That map is huge! As cool as the motion sensor in MacBooks is, I feel it would be wrong to not mention that IBM had their Active Protection System 2 years earlier. Which makes me wonder if the game can be played with IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads' motion sensor as well. I'm using a newer MacBook Pro (all flash storage) which doesn't seem to have a sensor. I haven't tried with a tablet, either.
posted by donttouchmymustache at 12:51 AM on November 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

ugh, I love a good Knytt-esque thinger but the controls on this are just so awfully finicky (on PC) that I'm finding it really unpleasant to play. Every little curve in the drawing makes the player skip and jump erratically.
posted by en forme de poire at 2:28 AM on November 28, 2015

Tilting my Lenovo T420s doesn't do anything, but the arrow keys work fine.
posted by Autumn Leaf at 8:34 PM on November 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

I think the bumps and curves are on purpose. It's like an actual hoverboard!
posted by numaner at 8:51 AM on November 30, 2015 [1 favorite]